The Turning Point

In the decades to come, historians may well look back on the partisan passage of Obamacare during President Obama's first term and its disastrous implementation in the second as a Pyrrhic victory, the beginning of the end of the Progressive project to "fundamentally transform" the United States of America. Whether Senator Ted Cruz ultimately succeeds in his quest to defund Obamacare this time, his electrifying quasi-filibuster yesterday and today nevertheless marks a turning point in modern American political history -- the day when conservatives turned their back on the collaborationist Republican Party and finally fought back.

It's been a long time coming. The tottering bonzes of the GOP were so mesmerized and intimated by a young upstart named Barack Hussein Obama back in 2008 -- even though they should have seen him coming as long ago as 2004, when he became the inevitable nominee of a party that could finally put its money where its mouth had long been -- that they were utterly incapable of mounting any effective opposition to him. What little pushback there was came, almost by accident, from Sarah Palin, John McCain's running mate, who was quickly muzzled by the establishment apparatchiks and then marginalized by a compliant and vicious media. The Permanent Bipartisan Fusion Party protects its own:

John McCain’s former senior adviser Steve Schmidt says he has “deep regret” for helping to create a “freak show” wing of the Republican Party when he had a hand in bringing former McCain running mate Sarah Palin to the national stage.

Schmidt said Monday on MSNBC’s “Hardball” that it’s time for the GOP to stand up to the “asininity” embodied by Palin and others.

“For the last couple of years, we’ve had this wing of the party running roughshod over the rest of the party. Tossing out terms like RINO, saying we’re going to purge, you know, the moderates out of the party,” Schmidt said. “We’ve lost five U.S. Senate seats over the last two election cycles. And fundamentally we need Republicans, whether they’re running for president, whether they’re in the leadership of the Congress, to stand up against a lot of this asininity.”

Well, one man's asininity is another man's principles, but principles are something the PBFP doesn't much understand. The only principle that counts to them is maintenance of office; long ago they realized there's no percentage in bucking the system. Far better (for Republicans) to pretend to be "conservative" during election season -- especially in the Senate -- only to return to "Senate comity" once safely past the shoals of the electorate. In the winter, they're Buddhists, in the summer they're nudists, to quote the late Joe Gould.

No longer -- Cruz's "filibuster" has changed all that. For Republicans, the year is suddenly 1968 and they are in the same position the Democrats were back then. This time, there's no pitched battles in the streets of Chicago as Obama's mentor, Bill Ayers, and others went up against Mayor Daley's pigs and came out broken, bloodied but unbowed as they fought for control of the party of slavery, segregation, sedition and secularism. Four years later, they had replaced Hubert Humphrey with George McGovern as part of their long march through the institutions.